Hamel HusainML Engineer Helping Companies Build AI Products

When to Stop Using Premium Models for Everything (And How to Know)

14 Jan 2026 · 0 min

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In this segment, Hamel Husain explains that while it’s understandable to start prototyping with the most powerful, expensive AI models, doing so without systematic evaluations can waste money. He emphasizes that running evaluations (evals) helps determine the smallest model that still meets the required performance, enabling a smarter cost‑performance trade‑off rather than defaulting to premium models for every task.

When you're starting out, it's reasonable to use the most expensive, powerful model you can for everything because you're just trying to prototype. But if you don't have evals, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. Eval lets you understand what the minimum size of model is that will get you the performance you need so you can make the right cost-performance tradeoff and not just use the most expensive thing all the time.